"We demonstrated that the efficacy of the transgenic fungi is so much better than the wild type that it justifies continued development," said Raymond St. Leger, a Distinguished University Professor of Entomology at UMD and co-author of the study.
The fungus is a naturally occurring pathogen that infects insects in the wild and kills them slowly. It has been used to control various pests for centuries. The scientists used a strain of the fungus that is specific to mosquitoes and engineered it to produce a toxin that kills mosquitoes more rapidly than they can breed. This transgenic fungus caused mosquito populations in their test site to collapse to unsustainable levels within two generations.
"You can think of the fungus as a hypodermic needle we use to deliver a potent insect-specific toxin into the mosquito," said St. Leger.
The toxin is an insecticide called Hybrid. It is derived from the venom of the Australian Blue Mountains funnel-web spider and has been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for application directly on crops to control agricultural insect pests.
"Simply applying the transgenic fungus to a sheet that we hung on a wall in our study area caused the mosquito populations to crash within 45 days," Lovett said. "And it is as effective at killing insecticide-resistant mosquitoes as non-resistant ones."
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190530141501.htm